Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

Twitter @haarsager

Monday, 29 August 2005

At TiVo, a Risk of Being Skipped Over

Laura Rich has a long interview with Thomas S. Rogers, the new CEO of TiVo, in which he says, "... The other set of things that we hope will really keep us at the cutting edge so that TiVo continues to be set apart as a brand are the advanced television applications. The things that have really begun to resound with consumers. Mobility in television: you’re on a business trip, take your television shows with you. The kids want to take their shows on a family trip – the ability to do that with TiVo-To-Go, the announcement we made with Microsoft not long ago. The ability to remotely record something: You’re at work, you here about a great show from other people, you say, “Oh, I’m not going to be home in time, what do I do?” You can go right into the Web site and from there make sure your own TiVo from home records the show. You have multiple television sets in a household and you’ve recorded something on one set, but now you’re in the bedroom and you want to watch it on another – the networking of your TiVos to be able to send shows from television to television. ¶ The ability to take shows from the Internet, which is a growing source of video, which today people don’t think is a full television experience, but over time, all that video coming in over the Internet may be an increasingly important part of what people think of as television. But it’s only going to be real television if you get it from your broadband wire, that now goes to your computer, and actually get it to your TV. Well, that’s not an easy thing to make sure that that stuff shows up on your television in the same menu, easily accessed in the way regular channels do. And TiVo is right at the cutting edge of doing that. So those are the kinds of things that I think will distinguish TiVo from a consumer point of view. The advertising capability distinguishes it from an industry point of view, assuming we continue to do that in a consumer-friendly way. ..." Link: New York Times.